I'm Orthodox, what do YOU believe?

Being Orthodox can be tough sometimes. Why can't we think of good answers to the tough questions? Most non-Orthodox Christians will be quite friendly and even interested in learning more about our worship and the life of the Church. However, there's that vocal minority of well meaning evangelistically un-Orthodox who bury us with the supposedly end-all questions. For our part, embarassingly enough, we put our heads down and concede defeat in a battle of logics.

Does any of this sound familiar?:

Where is THAT in the Bible?

Why do you worship liturgically?

Why do you worship Mary?

Why do you baptize babies?

Why do you need tradition?

et cetera

There are many reasonable, logical, and even experiential reasons for us to believe in that which we do. Moreover, I'd like to believe that each one of us cradle Orthodox should be able to each look into ourselves and hope that if we hadn't been born Orthodox, we would have found our way into the Church somehow. My proposal is that we Orthodox need to start turning these questions back over on themselves.

Try to answer like this:

What you believe, prove THAT to me in the Scriptures!

If you don't worship liturgically, do you worship spontaneously? Show me in scripture where Jesus prescribes the order for Sunday worship. I don't imagine there was much guitar and keyboard playing there.

We don't worship Mary, but if YOUR Lord and Saviour had a mother who stuck by Him faithfully through His death at the foot of the Cross and onto His Resurrection, how would YOU treat her?

We don't exclusively baptize babies, we baptize everyone regardless of age so they may be buried and Resurrected with Christ. If you don't have a practice of baptizing babies, what would you call your practice? Early teenage baptism?

We have tradition because we have to accept things in the mindset they were handed down to us. Not sure about that? Well try reading A Tale of Two Cities or To Kill a Mockingbird without knowing about the French Revolution or the Segregationist American South. Context can be helpful, unless you think you can para-drop a million native language Bibles over an isolated Pacific island and be able to build a coherent Christian Church.

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I'm not saying to be snotty, mean spirited, or impatient. However a good Orthodox Christian should be able to stand up and defend his or her Faith when the time calls for it.

-Steve K

God is dead...but only in Manhattan- Dinesh Dsouza

To the brave saints trying to start an Orthodox parish in Manhattan...

"Mark Lilla's "The Politics of God," from yesterday's New York Times Magazine, reflects the bafflement of the liberal intelligentsia in coming to terms with the worldwide revival of religion. Lilla is a respected political scientist at Columbia University, and his essay begins with all the pomposity of the secular liberal establishment. "We in the West are disturbed and confused...We find it incomprehensible that theological ideas still stir up messianic passions...We had assumed this was no longer possible...We were wrong."

Having discovered the obvious--that God is dead only in Manhattan--our campus Sherlock gives us a potted history of the religious wars. These wars culminated in what he terms the Great Separation. Yes, Lilla is genuflecting, as all approved New York Times pundits must, to the grand scheme of separation of church and state. "We have chosen to keep our politics unilluminated by divine revelation." Apparently Lilla has forgotten about the Declaration of Independence, which traces the source of our inalienable rights to none other than "the Creator." The doctrine that "all men are created equal" is derived from the theological concept that we are all equal in the eyes of God.
..."
- Dinesh D'souza (full article)

Are you from a non-denominational mega-church?

Because it seems more like a small denomination to me

-Steve K

Finally...

The Site Feed on the side bar is working

Pope Dude....of Kansas

Come on...don't act like you didn't want to try this before.

Maybe it shouldn't be so easy to buy vestments online?

Found this on wikipedia a while back...thought it would be fun to share:


"
David Bawden
...

Justification for electing a pope

According to Catholic theology, the church possesses popes in perpetuity (First Vatican Council, 1870), and it has always the right to supply itself with the Pope. The official process of election, through a papal conclave of the College of Cardinals, is not a divinely ordered process for selection but a method created by the Church to replace earlier methods. Sedevacantists argue that if the College of Cardinals will not or cannot elect a valid pope, ordinary Catholics can do so, under the principle of "Epikeia".

According to sedevacantists, none of the appointments made since 1958 to the College of Cardinals is valid, as the popes who made them were themselves invalid. As there are no surviving members of the pre-1958 College of Cardinals, according to their theory there is no college to do the electing, necessitating a new interim procedure to elect a new pope who would then fill the vacancies and so create a valid College of Cardinals.

Process for his election

Acting on the basis of this, David Bawden was elected Pope by six people (including himself, his parents Mr. Kennett Bawden and Mrs. Clara Bawden, a Mr. & Mrs. Robert Hunt, and a Mrs. Teresa Stanfill-Benns, who had been the main motivator of the Election. Benns since has withdrawn her support of Bawden for heresy she says was expressed pre-election - occultly - in the book she co-authored with him and post-election in Internet posts in September 2006 and March 2007.) The election was held on July 16, 1990 in Belvue, Kansas in the United States in a store owned by the Bawden family.

Mrs. Benns and Mr. David Bawden, who together summoned the assembly to elect the pope in 1990, claim to have invited all orthodox Catholics to join, but received only six respondents. They then formed the assembly which elected Bawden, who took the reign name Michael. He said that his motivation came from Pope Leo XIII's decision to institute the Invocation of St. Michael Archangel, and to add it to every Tridentine Mass.

That invocation was deleted following the Second Vatican Council by Paul VI.

...
"

Fallacious Fallacies: Bill Maher

" If Judaism or Christianity actually taught even a fraction of the absurdities Bill Maher apparently thinks they teach, I would send him my resume and petition him to bring me on as a co-producer of his upcoming documentary, “The Absurdity of Religion” (title still indefinite), as announced last night on Larry King Live. I too would want to reveal the fraud.
....
If Christianity really taught that God created cancer, child abusers and earthquakes to torture his own children, I too would doubt. But Mr. Maher, Christianity doesn’t teach that. The evil in this world is not willed by God. Christianity teaches both physical and moral evil is a result of a world that is out of wack as a result of the misuse of our own human freedom. Like a good parent, God allows us to make mistakes and to live with the consequences. And even so, he doesn’t abandon us. He promises to bring forth a greater good out of every instance of evil. Ask someone with faith who has suffered great pain or loss and they will surely tell you how God has made good on his promise.
....
"
- Fr. John Morris, Fox News <full article>

All the small things...

I don't know if I'd call it properly "mysticism." Perhaps it's more accurate to describe it as the intangible and mysterious experience of Orthodox worship. In either case, I find that it's not just important that the Orthodox have symbolic worship, but that the symbolism we practice is a dynamic and continuous symbolism, which does not manufacture symbols anew every generation, but carries on the traditional symbolism used since apostolic times. Moreover, nothing should be considered as "just a symbol." We are not perfected as of yet and are still in need of these little glimpses of the age to come.

For example, many churches have discarded the Cross and sacred images. However, the images that were once kept in their houses have been replaced with decorative Bible verses. The cross has been supplanted by the convenient bumper sticker "Jesus Fish." A few years ago I once met a man who wore 3 nails around his neck to commemorate the nailing of Jesus's hands and feet to the Cross, but not an actual Cross.

Whatever zeal there was to remove dead imagery from the Church created a void which was replaced by....other symbols.

Our priests wear vestments and we all face East when we gather together to pray. You can say that it's unnecessary and that "God hears you no matter what!" But that's not the point. The point is that the symbolism of the vested priest and facing towards the East allows for our experience of the worship to be oriented in a way befitting proper worship in the Church. Since we are part of the Church, we receive even the smallest things in a spirit and mindset forged by 2000 years of experience.

As an altar server for lo these past...oh my...18 years...I have always been curious about the rites in which we bury the Cross behind the altar on Good Friday behind the closed curtain. Much care is placed into anointing the Cross with incense and rose water and wrapping it in white. So much care is placed into something that the majority of church goers will never see. I'd like to think that the smell of the incense and the visual of the buried Cross, symbolic indeed, still carries with it a definite and powerful experience, even if for just a very few on the altar.

-Steve K

Christian Nation?

"...
Only a few years ago, if a person was found lying on the sidewalk, someone would stop to help. The only exception was skid row on Saturday night, when drunkenness was common. Now hardly anyone stops, even at midday in the "best" neighborhoods. Homelessness, drug abuse, and AIDS are common, and no one wants to get involved. Besides, civil libertarians have taught us that autonomy is the highest value. Stepping over a prostrate individual truly expresses how highly we value autonomy, at least our own. It says less for the value we place on human life, and still less for the example we are giving our children and the society we are leaving for them. A study of non Jews who rescued Jews during the Holocaust showed that rescuers tended to have a strong religious background and sense of community. We seem to be doing our best to rid our society of such persons. One can only hope that we will need them again.

Even the Boy Scout Oath is under attack. What is wrong with teaching young people to do their duty to God and country, in that order? Perhaps that is the key point. Perhaps that is what irritated the editor of the medical journal. We may soon live in a country where nothing, especially God, comes before what we want, or what the experts want, or what the government wants. Despite my friends' fears, there are no pogroms. Skinheads and the Klan must be watched, true, but they are small groups with little influence and less religion. The reason we fear to go out after dark is not that we may be set upon by bands of evangelicals and forced to read the New Testament, but that we may be set upon by gangs of feral young people who have been taught that nothing is superior to their own needs or feelings. And if religious (and secular) fanatics are to be feared, what could possibly strengthen their hand more than the continued disintegration of society? When the majority religion is under attack, should a minority feel safer? Christians are resented as reminders of universal ethical rules; will Jews be better received?

That a society can preserve ethical values and transmit them to subsequent generations in the absence of a permanent source for them is a belief unsupported by historical evidence. It requires a leap of faith just as does a belief in God. Nevertheless, we are betting everything we have that it is correct. As a Jew, I occasionally felt mild discomfort living in a Christian country. As a human being and a Jew, I frequently feel real fear living in a post Christian country. A Christian country? Barely, and not for long, unless we do something about it."
- David Stolinsky (whole article here)
HT: Orthodoxy Today

live from Hamilton!

after a week without internet, moving from Piscataway to Hamilton Township, NJ, OVBS and working, I'm finally back online!
-Steve K